The Circuit

After some years on the road I knew most of the faces in a convention hall before I walked in. The European tattoo scene of that time revolved around one line-up. The same artists moved from city to city, weekend after weekend, and new blood was the exception rather than the rule. Milan, Berlin, a smaller town the following month: the posters changed, the booths stayed the same.

When the Exchange Runs Dry

A convention is worth the journey only as long as people come to share what they know. That is the whole argument of What a Convention Is For. But exchange needs difference. When the same people meet again and again, the conversations begin to repeat. There is less to show and less to ask, and at some point the essence leaks away.

What was left was a feeling I did not expect from conventions: lost time. Three days away from the studio, and nothing new carried home.

Visitors, Not Artists

For years I was the one artist from the Russian scene on many of those floors. Sometimes you learned only by chance that another Russian was working somewhere in the hall. Russians came, but as visitors, not as tattooists behind the booths, and it stayed that way until around 2010 or 2012. Even the convention in St. Petersburg, where I always returned to see my friends, showed the same picture from the other side: a culturally closed country, and inside it the same closed circle.

Outside the Circle

Two conventions stood apart: London and Paris. Their popularity and their format kept them outside the circuit. Both worked by invitation only, and that selection brought in what the rest of the circuit lacked: younger artists, unfamiliar names, real talent seen for the first time.

London, for me, was the clearest case. In those years everything there was right, down to details most visitors never notice. Artists were registered ahead of time and could build their booths before the doors opened, so the public walked into a finished hall, not past a queue of tattooists still waiting to get in. Small things like that make quality. Other events had far more debatable moments, in one situation or another. In London the balance always came out positive.

Paris was different from London in its own ways, and some of them I may have missed behind the language barrier. But it stood on the same side of the line.

Two Instead of Eight

Around 2014 or 2015 I began to travel much less, for more than one reason. The closed circle was one of them. When I did go, I went where the exchange was still alive: London and Paris, with St. Petersburg kept for friends. It was not a retreat from conventions. It was a choice of where they still made sense.